Crash dilemmas and the ethical design of self-driving vehicles: implications from metaethics and pragmatic road marks

Abstract How should self-driving vehicles react when an accident can no longer be averted in dangerous situations? The complex issue of designing crash algorithms has been discussed intensively in recent research literature. This paper refines the discourse around a new perspective which reassesses the underlying dilemma structures in the light of a metaethical analysis. It aims at enhancing the critical understanding of both the conceptual nature and specific practical implications that relate to the problem of crash algorithms. The ultimate aim of the paper is to open up a way to building a bridge between the inherent structural issues of dilemma cases on the one hand and the characteristics of the practical decision context related to driving automation scenarios on the other. Based on a reconstruction of the metaethical structure of crash dilemmas, a pragmatic orientation towards the ethical design of crash algorithms is sketched and critically examined along two central particularities of the practical problem. Firstly, pertinent research on the social nature of crash dilemmas is found to be merely heuristic. Secondly, existing work from ethics of risk hardly offers explicit ethical solutions to relevant and urgent challenges. Further investigation regarding both aspects is ultimately formulated as a research desideratum.